Site Kilo-29 Master Military Operations Command Winter-1993 Day Four-Morning Roughly T Minus 4 Hours One of the privates licked his lips and stared at Kincaid, who was standing next to me with his back to them. "You... you wouldn't dare." the private said. "Right now, you're wondering if you can take me since I'm facing away from you." Kincaid said, still keeping pressure on the igniter. "Go ahead, try it. Let's get it over with." "Everyone at ease that shit." Donaldson snapped. Command came easy to the boy. In the absence of an officer, of an NCO who wasn't suffering from a broken skull and half mad, he stepped up to the plate and took charge, trying to do whatever he could to get the men he felt responsible for through the situation alive. If we survived I'd put him in for a promotion, see about getting him fast tracked through PLDC, and try to get him a decent posting. I'd probably send Kincaid with him, if he could pass the psych eval. "Let's just do what we came to do." Donaldson said. "Kincaid, Ant, go stop this shit from happening. Michaels, Hetson, put a pressure dressing on Jacob's stomach wound. The rest of you, stand guard, we've still got the cannibals out there and I don't want any more surprises." "Yes, Corporal." Everyone chorused, except for me. I was looking at the tiled roof, scanning over the curved steel walls of the room. There were three sets of stairs leading up, with stairs leading down, spiraled stairs that compromised the integrity of the room the least. "Shads, come here a minute." Donaldson said. He'd let go of my arm and moved a few paces away. Kincaid glanced at me, then moved over to Donaldson while I began lurching from terminal to terminal glancing at the blurry screens. Kincaid followed me, a looming, silent presence in a bulky suit and packing a flamethrower. A small brown hare was scratching at its ear under a chair when I walked up, and when I got about two feet from it it suddenly bolted around the terrace. "Keep an eye on Sergeant Ant, Shads." Donaldson said. "He trusts the three of us, but I don't know how he's going to react to the new guys. He's lucid right now, or about as lucid as he's going to get, and I don't know how long we have till he drops back into a psychotic break again." "Roger, Corporal." Shads said. "I'll just keep him on his feet, keep him moving, if he sits down, he'll probably die." I was only half paying attention to the two men talking, noting which groups did what, and matching where they were in the circular room according to the colored pipes that stretched vertically up the far wall, appearing at the floor and disappearing at the ceiling. That would let me place where everything was. The mental image I kept building of the room kept crumbling, I was having a hard time holding my mental layout through the weird numbing feeling I was getting. It was getting harder and harder to hold on to the thoughts I was trying to keep track of. Normally I could keep track three or four things at once, usually holding a mental image of the layout around me. Now the image kept failing. I figured I was tired. "I want you to keep a close eye on him, but don't rile him up. Do you know what the hell he's talking about when he starts talking about that woman?" Donaldson asked. "Yeah, and trust me, Corporal, you don't want to know." Shads said. "He's repressing it, and I don't fucking blame him." I was still aware of his words, but they weren't really making sense and I couldn't hold onto what they meant. They were all just disconnected individual words. I knew what each individual word meant, maybe even what they meant connected to the one before and after it, but I couldn't make sense of the sentence itself. "From what Carter told me before he killed himself, I'm surprised Ant hasn't done the same." Shads was saying. "I'll admit, I always thought Carter was exaggerating about him, but look at him and tell me that you'd have believed he was real." Kincaid stopped and tapped a screen, tapping a city name. "I wish, Sergeant, that this place would take a hit." He turned and looked at me through the face shield. "Those two women were right about one thing, Sergeant." I waited, and behind me, Shads and Donaldson kept talking. "If we get out of here, you coming with me and Kincaid?" Donaldson asked. "If Sergeant Ant's putting together a new crew, I want in on it." "Yeah." He sounded like his sad self. "We've seen too much to go back to our old units, you know?" "Yeah." Donaldson echoed Shads. "We'll all keep an eye out on each other, make sure that we don't turn out like Sergeant Ant." Shads chuckled, a depressing sounding noise. In the mental map I was building he was replaced with Droopy the Dog for a moment. "What makes you think that he isn't the best his friends could keep him." He sighed. "I think if I'd been with them on that mountain, I'd have killed myself by now." "Well, Sergeant, where do we go now?" Kincaid asked. "Downstairs. I'm pretty sure that what we need is on the lower part of this room." I told him. He nodded behind the helmet, smiling, and we clomped over to the stairs. "What happened to the woman he keeps referring to?" Donaldson asked. ...I brushed the snow wake from the window, smiling as the dark room was revealed. The snow tunnel we'd drug from the motorpool snaked behind me, with the rest of our tiny group behind me... ...the room was cold, but warmer than outside. The dark inside the room was much friendlier than the dark outside. The others were quietly crawling out of the tunnel and into the room through the broken window... ..."Once we open this door, we go in hard, and we kill every one of them." Stokes said. "We let Ant lead the way."... ..."Are we sure that's wise?" Carter asked... ..."You want to keep him from the guys that butchered... The memory shattered before Nancy could say her name. I sneezed, blood and pinkish fluid coated my hand from my nose. Not thickly, just a light coating that was mostly tiny droplets. "It's getting worse, Fifty, you need to hurry." Nagle said, leaning against the wall my the stairs we were heading for. "Is there anything that might give me a chance?" I asked her. "I don't care about going down, I've had a good run, and we all knew that sooner or later I was going to die doing something stupid." Nancy bit her lip as we approached, her eyes going distant, when we were about ten paces away, she snapped out of it, looking at me. "There's something that might give you chance, but it has a chance to kill you quicker." "What is it? It might be worth the risk." I told her. "I just need to stay on my feet long enough to finish the mission. Stop the launches, check what kind of disease it is, and make sure everyone's in quarantine. If it'll give me a couple days, it might be worth it." Kincaid had stopped at the same time I did, looking back and forth between where Nagle was standing and me. Nagle sighed, reaching up to rub her eyes briefly. She looked exhausted. "Get a surgical drill, see if the trauma ward has the right kind of bit, and do a trepanning on you." "Drill a fucking hole in my head? Are you fucking crazy?" I asked her. "I'm not walking around with a goddamn hole in my head!" She glared at me, and I stopped talking. "There's two things that might save your life. Have one of these idiots cut a hole in your head with a drill, or have one of them slice open your scalp over the fracture you more than likely have, remove any bone fragments, and drill the hole through the fracture to directly relieve the blood pooling under the fracture." She said. "There's no fucking way I'm trusting any of these guys to lay me down and slice open my head to fuck with my skull." I told her. "Just forget it. Isn't there anything else? My only choices are let them slice open my scalp and pick out any bone fragments, drill a hole through the fracture, or fucking die? There's got to be something else." "No, Ant, there isn't. Other than those options, it's all up to you." She told me. "So this time I'm on my own? It's all up to me and Martin?" I squeezed Martin and he ooked softly, stroking my arm. "No, Ant, it isn't. Think about it." She laughed. Kincaid stepped over to me, setting his hand on my shoulder and squeezing gently. He didn't know how bad it hurt when he did so, the way something shifted in the socket hurt. "Sergeant, I know you're old crew isn't here with us." Kincaid said gently. "Look at it like this, Sergeant, your old crew was Cold War, we're not. The Cold War is over, so maybe it's time for a new crew." I stared at him for a moment, wanting to yell at him that it didn't matter that the Cold War was over, nothing had changed, but I stopped. He was right. Nancy and Bomber were running their own crews, Taggart had reclassified as an analyst. Heather was into her own thing, spending about half of her time in a unit that despised her, the rest of the time 'tasked' or training. Nagle had hooked her up with people to get her the training she needed. I needed to build a new crew. Bomber, Nagle, Taggart and I would never run together again, not like we used to. The last time we'd worked together, they'd been in charge of their own teams, and the OIC had put me in charge of team coordination, and that was about as close as it had come after 2/19th had shut down. It was time to build a new crew. "You realize, K-Bar, what you are getting into?" I asked him. "No, I don't." Kincaid said. He stepped slightly closer and lowered his voice. "I know what I might have to do. I've come to realize what makes someone like you." He grinned inside the suit. "At first I couldn't understand you, I figured you were one of those hooah assholes that belonged in the past, didn't belong in the Army and was everything that was wrong with it. Then you threatened me, and I hated you." The grin grew broader. "Then I realized that you're probably a decent guy outside of the mission. I wanted to beat some sense into Wilkins, then I wanted to flat out shoot him. We didn't have time to hold his hand, I suddenly understood all of it." He clicked the igniter. "I'm a good soldier, Sergeant. I'm not worth a shit beyond being a soldier." He shrugged. "Dee's my only friend, Sergeant, and the Army is the only family I really have." We clomped down the steps, my boots ringing on the steel, the armored and swaddled feet of Kincaid's suit thumping. "I know now what made you the way you are." We stepped on one of the diamond steel plates and the lights kicked on, revealing huge servers with quietly blinking lights. The old tape reels were still sitting there, with their standby lights on, but in the middle of the room were over two dozen huge computer banks. One of lights exploded over the banks, showering them in shattered glass and sparks. "That's starting to feel comforting." Kincaid chuckled as we kept moving down the spiral steps. "If we get through this, if you put together a team, I want in on it." We paused for a second on the bottom of the stairs, and Kincaid kept talking. "This is both the coolest and the most important thing I've ever been involved with. The thought that they built this using 1950's technology amazes me." We headed toward the row of terminals on the left side of the group of servers. "The little things, light the lights, might fail, but the place is fucking impressive." I grunted, pulling the chair out on the first terminal and sitting down. My head swum and I almost fell out of the chair, almost dropping Martin, but Kincaid steadied me. I set Martin on my lap so he could watch me work while Kincaid kept talking. "The massive amount of effort put into this place gets to me. I usually look at shit that was built or happened before I was born with scorn. You know, they couldn't have built anything as cool as we do, they were barely better than medieval, we're so much better." He took a deep breath and sighed. "Then I realized that not only had men built this with technology from the 1950's, using dynamite and jackhammers, that the minds behind the atomic bomb and so much else had figured out how to do all this, how not only to create it, but do it entirely in secret." It took a little while for the computer to start getting me information. It was updated hardware, but the back pages of my little green notebook had all the instructions I needed because the software was pretty much the same. While I called up what processes this server was performing, Kincaid still kept talking, more to himself than me, I guessed. "Just this is amazing enough." He said, then chuckled again. "The thought that there are more, like dozens from what you said, scattered all over the U.S., all built in secret just boggles my mind." He paused for a moment. "It doesn't matter, if you're putting together a new crew, I want in." I stopped what I was doing at that, swiveling in the chair and looking at him. "You realize, Kincaid, that it's only going to end one of two ways if everyone is infected." I told him. "We're going to have scorch and burn this place, and then the last person will either have to die in the implosion, or will be forced to kill themselves. Can you live with that?" He stared at me, new lines carved into his face by the knowledge making him look a hell of a lot older than the twenty odd years he was. "Yeah, I can. Suicide isn't something I'm too interested in, but if that's the way it has to be, then that's what we've got to do." The computer beeped and I held up my hand for Kincaid to pause. I hit the server with a couple requests and then turned back to Kincaid, staring at him for a long time. "I'll make it quick. I've done a lot of bad shit, but I won't condemn your everlasting soul to Hell." I told him. He grinned and nodded. "Pistol or knife?" He thought for a second. "Don't care, as long as you don't try to do me with a rifle." We both laughed at that as Donaldson came down the stairs, and the computer beeped at me, demanding my attention. I had bypassed the main servers and logic crunching systems, looking for any connections to secondary systems. The connections to the main system had closed sometime between the shootout with the agents and when I'd done what I'd done. I could see where the computers were dumping file backups, and the system even tossed me the room identifier codes. "What are we talking about?" Donaldson asked. "I'm trying to convince Sergeant Ant to put together a new squad if we get out of here alive." Kincaid said honestly. "You want in too, Dee?" "Hand me the maps, will you?" I asked. Donaldson handed me the thick leather folder of them, and I pulled them out, paging through the corners until I found the page where the map key had the map section identifiers that matched the header of the location where the dump was taking place. Donaldson was quiet a moment, then answered. "Might as well. What am I gonna do, go back to a normal Engineer unit after this shit? Who the hell am I gonna talk to? Who the fuck is going to understand why I sleep with the lights on and won't go outside when it starts fucking snowing?" "How about Shads?" Kincaid asked. "Fine with me, but that one's up to the Sergeant. How do you feel about him?" Donaldson asked. According to the map, the backups were on a level below this one, only connected to the section we were in. Better yet, the system I was sitting in front of had connected to the backup for this system, and someone had left it with the security holes that the Air Force Tech had shown me. A few quick keystrokes and the file I wanted was opening in local editing mode, which meant that I could access the file without it making a backup copy to check for changes thanks to the trick the Air Force Tech had written down for me. "Pretty good. He keeps his cool, but there's something about him, man." Kincaid said. I could feel him glance at me. "Plus, sounds like he knows more than Sergeant Ant wants him to."

"That won't be a problem if we don't get out of here." Donaldson said. The file opened up and I shook my head. The file wasn't even encrypted, and I jotted down the login and passwords I'd need for root access on the server in front of me and the secondary systems. The second file I opened show me that the backup system stored backups on a different system, but the same room, which fit perfectly with what we needed to do. "Shit, I don't know about everyone else, but I'm getting out of here." Kincaid said. "Hell, I'm even going to do my best to get everyone else out of here." He paused for a moment. "I might even try to save that little punk Purret and fucking Wilkins." Donaldson chuckled at that. The file closed and saved, and I logged back out and relogged in again as the admin instead of technical staff. I saw movement out of the corner of my eye, and when I looked down, there was a small brown rabbit sitting next to my chair. "Hi, little guy." I said, leaning down slowly and scratching between his ears. He pushed against me in silent pleasure. Martin ooked, and I petted his head and both of us watched as the bunny sped off and vanished between the mainframe racks. "Didja see the bunny, Martin?" "Uh-oh." Donaldson said. I glanced at Martin, who was looking up at me with his big innocent eyes. I hugged him and went back to the computer. A handful of keystrokes, and it brought up the file I wanted. When I typed in the commands and fired up the program I wanted, the system immediately warned me. ***WARNING*** SYSTEM WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL TEST IS COMPLETED BACKUP SYSTEMS WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL AFTER FILE INTEGRITY VERIFICATION IS COMPLETE PRIMARY SYSTEM WILL BE DISCONNECTED FROM SECONDARY SYSTEM WHILE TEST IS ONGOING ENSURE ALL USERS ARE LOGGED OFF AND ALL FILES ARE SAVED REBOOTING SYSTEM WILL RESULT IN FILE DAMAGE DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE (Y/N): __ "You wanna push it, Martin?" I asked, looking down. Martin shook his head no, so I reached out, hit "Y" and watched as the backup system acknowledged the handoff, started the operations, hardware, and file tests, and broke connection. "All right, we've got an hour or so to handle the other mainframe set." I said, standing up. "I'm pretty sure that this is the main server slash mainframe running the entire site right now." "Right." Donaldson said, Kincaid smiled, popping the igniter while he finished. "So what do we do?" I lurched over and leaned against the front cover of the mainframe, pulling my leatherman out and checking where the front cover met up with the sides. "So how long will it take you hack the system or upload a virus, or whatever it is you going to have to do to keep this thing from launching?" Donaldson asked. Kincaid laughed. "We aren't going to do any of that." Kincaid laughed. "We don't have to hack the computer or some shit like that to stop this." He popped the igniter again. "Then how do we stop the launch? Keys or something? Defuse the weapons?" "Fuck no." I told him. "We hit the weakest link." I used the Phillips to start removing the screws. "So, what?" Donaldson asked. "We just wreck up the fucking thing." I told him. "Hell, it isn't rocket science. One of the lessons of the Vietnam War is that a fifty million dollar piece of equipment can be put out of service, hell, it can get wrecked all to fuck, by a pissed off guy with a rock." The last of the screws came off of the side, and I worked my hand under the sheet metal cover, getting a good grip on it, and tore the cover off with one yank. The screws popped, and the whole thing tore free to expose old mid-80's computer equipment, hard drives the size of a pair of VCR's stacked on top of each other, and old style ribbon cables. I moved to the next one, just undoing one side and letting the other two men pull the covers off of them. "Now, we shut down the system." I grinned, walking to the one I'd figured was the primary mainframe running the whole shebang. "Wait, you're just going to..." Donaldson started. I leaned back slightly and kicked into the massive computer, the heel of my boot hitting a chip laden board and breaking it into about six pieces. Computer chips popped out, bouncing on the tile floor. "SYSTEM FAILURE! SYSTEM FAILURE! ALERT! SYSTEM FAILURE!" "Hit 'em, Kincaid." I said, stepping back. "Fuck yeah!" Kincaid said, stepping up to the one he was standing in front of. "Burn, bitch!" He triggered the flamethrower, holding the flame inside the heavy steel box of the computer case. "Fire now, motherfucker!" He laughed while he cooked the components inside the cases into slag. I started grabbing the magnetic tape reels and ripping them right off. Across the room from me Donaldson was using the butt of his rifle to smash the huge VCR tapes or the massive video disks in platters of 8 or 12. "SYSTEM FAILURE! WAR-" the recording suddenly cut out when Donaldson smashed up a set of video disk platters. "What about the reactor?" Donaldson asked when we started working on the third and last wall of computer equipment. "That thing has its own system, completely separate and isolated from this system or any other to keep it from being tampered with. About all that can be done from here is start it up or shut it down." I told him, pausing for a moment. "The environmental controls will all be run by the redundant systems that were set up in case an EMP check blew all this shit out. The doors and everything else run off of secondary systems and redundant backups. If worse comes to worse I can open the doors on purely mechanical systems." "OK." Donaldson said, pulling one of the chairs up and sitting in it, rubbing his chest. "What about the main door." The next were racks of huge hard drives, about the size of snare drums, that I just started by kicking the stabilizer rod free and then grabbing one side of the rack and pulling on it. When the hard drives fell to the ground after a few moments of effort I'd made a decision. "If the main door controls shut down, if there aren't any backup systems, then the plan is simple." I told him, stepping back and reaching into my pocket for a pain pill and a booster. He waited till I ground them up between my teeth and took a swig of water to wash them down. "The entrance tunnel is what is knows as a blast deflection tunnel. The curve is to force the explosion to spend some of the force going through the curve. There are blast vents every hundred feet or so to dissipate more of the force." "Right. Blast and shockwaves are like water, I remember that from school." He said. I tossed him the painkillers. "Thanks." He started opening it. "All right, at the far end of the tunnel there are four big steel plates, outlined in yellow with X's across them. Those are overpressure sensor plates done the brute force way, since they have to stand up to the overpressure wave of a possible direct hit on the doors." I watched him take the pill and waited till he finished swallowing it and tossing the bottle back to me before continuing. "All you need to do is rig up small charges, say a half inch slice off of a C-4 brick like the ones I put in your ruck, to each of the plates and fire them all off at the same time." "What happens then?" Donaldson asked. Behind us, Kincaid was laughing as he torched the mainframes and servers. "It triggers the emergency charges, which will blow out a chunk of the mountain the size of the tunnel, to allow the blast to exit out of the opposite side, preventing it from creating the overpressure it would need to breach any of the doors." I told him. He nodded. "If anything happens to me, you know the last resort way of getting out of here." "How do we get down?" He asked. "You blow out that side of the mountain, it's going to be picked up by something. Satellite, seismic, and every town for 50 miles is going to hear those charges go off. They'll call the cops, and there'll be someone her to rescue you pretty soon after." I told him, moving back over to the next one. The lights dimmed, then came back on, pale and low and yellowish. The steel plates retracted and the emergency lights popped out but didn't come on. "Systems on local control. All systems on local control." It was a new voice. Female with a slight southern accent, speaking calmly. She repeated it once while I started snapping cards free of the case without bothering to try to remove them properly. One of them zapped me pretty hard and I cursed and waved my hand, trying to get the pain to quit. As soon as the tingling quit I went back to wrecking computer equipment that probably cost the American taxpayers millions. It had worked, but decided to keep my doubts to myself. It might not have. The reactor, I was sure, had it's own operating system, probably firmware on heavily shielded chipsets, but I hadn't been that sure about the rest of the systems. There wasn't any way I could really explain to Donaldson that I'd taken a risk with the computers, running a massive risk of sealing us up inside the mountain. Kincaid, yeah, I could tell him. He got the reason it might have to be, but I wasn't sure about Donaldson yet. The kid had leadership potential, yeah, but you needed something extra to run in the same circles I did. Hell, the shit I did bugged some of the operators I knew. I wasn't sure yet that that he had what it took to make some of the nasty decisions. Decisions like I knew I was going to have to do the minute we finished "seizing control" of the systems, how I was going to handle the survivors in the facility, and most of all, what I was going to do about all of us. My crew, and the Major's men. I know the protocols, knew the decisions that had to be made, and I knew I could make them. Kincaid could, but I wasn't sure if he was stable enough to be trusted with that kind of authority yet. Donaldson, though, Donaldson had potential. I finished smashing the inside of the last of the computers as Kincaid worked on another one of the mainframes, playing over the inside with his flamethrower, and I turned to Donaldson and held out my book to him. "In this is all the protocols you'll need to know." I told him, wincing as a stabbing pain rippled through my brain. "I'll write them down before we leave. If I die, you need to follow the protocols exactly." "Or they'll shoot us on sight and burn the bodies." Donaldson said. "Yeah." I put the notebook back in my pocket as Kincaid clicked off the flamethrower and started clomping over to us. "All right, Sergeant, this is done. What's next?" He asked. "We do the same to the backups and finish off the survivors of the CIA's Operation Bed Check." I told them. "After that, well, we'll figure out what happens next." "Hey, Sergeant, there's something I want to ask you about." Kincaid said, motioning to me to come closer. I moved over next to him. "I'm, uh, not exactly comfortable with using this thing on the guys if they're still alive." I smiled at him. "I'm glad to hear that." "I can't take my helmet off again, can I?" He asked. "No, K-Bar, you're in it until I say otherwise." I told him. "I alone remain to tell thee?" He asked. "Something like that." I answered. Donaldson shook his head. "What's the chance we aren't infected?" "Not sure. I want to run some blood tests and check." I said. "You feel ready to head back upstairs?" "Yeah, I'm ready." Donaldson said, and pushed himself to his feet. When we went back upstairs, everyone that had been left up there was staring. "Is... is it going to happen?" One of the Meatheads asked. "Not when we finish taking care of the other section. We have a couple hours to get there and wreck the joint up." I told them. "So we're like saving the world?" Michaels the Meathead asked. I laughed at that, then lit a cigarette. "No." I told him flatly. "The minute those fuckers launched, NORAD would send the self-destruct codes and blow them out of the fucking air." I told them, putting the pack away. "More than likely because of a lack of maintenance and pre-flight checks the thrust system would fail and drop a goddamn nuclear tipped rocket onto some fucking school and kill a bunch of kids." They all looked at me strange. "I... wasn't right... a little bit ago. I'm feeling better." I said, half telling the truth. My head was still pounding, and my vision kept tunneling slightly for a few moments before returning to normal. But I didn't want the launches to happen. I didn't want revenge on the whole world for something that... that... never happened. "At the most, they'd be detonated and there would be an outcry over it, massive investigations, and someone would be thrown under the bus. Probably us. At the least there would be a massive public outcry and someone would get thrown under the bus. Again, us." I said. "All we're doing is preventing an international incident and the chance that we end up being tried for launching the weapons through action or inaction." They all just stared. "So if you ladies are done standing around, let's take care of the problem, and get Jacobs to medical before he fucking dies." I snapped. With that, we headed to secondary control. Once we were done with that, it was time to take care of Jacob's bullet wound, do blood tests, and make my decision on what to do. Hopefully, Kincaid and his baby wouldn't be used on our own men. But my experiences with life had taught me that it was far more likely that Tandy would catch us and eat us all after we found out we were infected and all going to die.